Radical plan to split California into three states earns spot on November ballot

California’s 168-year run as a single entity, hugging the continent’s edge for hundreds of miles and sprawling east across mountains and desert, could come to an end next year — as a controversial plan to split the Golden State into three new jurisdictions qualified Tuesday for the Nov. 6 ballot.

If a majority of voters who cast ballots agree, a long and contentious process would begin for three separate states to take the place of California, with one primarily centered around Los Angeles and the other two divvying up the counties to the north and south. Completion of the radical plan — far from certain, given its many hurdles at judicial, state and federal levels — would make history.

It would be the first division of an existing U.S. state since the creation of West Virginia in 1863.
(Jon Schleuss / Los Angeles Times)

“Three states will get us better infrastructure, better education and lower taxes,” Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who sponsored the ballot measure, said in an email to The Times last summer when he formally submitted the proposal. “States will be more accountable to us and can cooperate and compete for citizens.”

In the initiative’s introductory passage, Draper argues that “vast parts of California are poorly served by a representative government dominated by a large number of elected representatives from a small part of our state, both geographically and economically.”

The proposal aims to invoke Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, the provision guiding how an existing state can be divided into new states. Draper’s plan calls for three new entities — Northern California, California and Southern California — which would roughly divide the population of the existing state into thirds.

Northern California would consist of 40 counties stretching from Oregon south to Santa Cruz County, then east to Merced and Mariposa counties. Southern California would begin with Madera County in the Central Valley and then wind its way along the existing state’s eastern and southern spine, comprising 12 counties and ultimately curving up the Pacific coast to grab San Diego and Orange counties.
A rich history of wanting to slice up California or split it off »

Los Angeles County would anchor the six counties that retained the name California under the longshot proposal, a state which would extend northward along the coast to Monterey County. Draper’s campaign website argues the three states would have reasonably similar household incomes and enough industries to produce their own viable economies.

It was that issue — economic sustainability — that helped fell two of Draper’s previous efforts in 2012 and 2014, to create six California states. Critics said some of the more rural regions would suffer from extraordinary rates of poverty as individual states, while coastal communities flourished in new, smaller states where the lion’s share of California tax revenue is generated.

Ultimately, though, it was a fumble by Draper’s political team that doomed the six-state effort. The campaign collected hundreds of thousands of signatures in 2014 on the initiative, only to see too many of them invalidated by elections officials.

Last September, he submitted the modified version that he calls “Cal-3.” On Tuesday, elections officials said a sample of the signatures projects more than 402,468 of them are valid — more than enough to be included on a November ballot that could see as many as 16 propositions by the deadline for certification later this month.

The cost of Draper’s 2018 effort is still unclear. While he spent almost $4.9 million of his own money on the unsuccessful signature drive in 2014, state records through last December report only about $559,000. That was before petition circulating intensified this past spring; vendors were told in March they would be paid $3 per signature — higher than many of the other proposals found on card tables set up outside stores and other public areas.

The history of California, admitted to the Union on Sept. 9, 1850, has been marked by more than 200 attempts to either reconfigure its boundaries, split it into pieces or even have the state secede and become an independent country. The last three-state proposal, crafted by a Butte County legislator, failed in the state Capitol in 1993.

A publicized effort by activists to have California secede from the United States, branded the ‘Calexit’ proposal, continues to be bandied about for the ballot in 2020.

Nothing about Draper’s historic demarcation of democracy would be easy. Were voters to approve his ballot measure, the effort would need the blessing of both houses of the California Legislature — lawmakers who, in a sense, would be asked to abandon their posts. Draper’s proposal says the initiative, acting under California’s constitutional power of voters to write their own laws, would serve as legislative consent. It is almost certain that interpretation would end up in court.

From there, the plan would need congressional approval. Here, too, politics would presumably play a major role.

Where California now has two seats in the 100-person U.S. Senate, the three states would have six seats in a 104-member chamber. That would dilute the power of other states and increase the power of what used to be a single state if its six senators banded together on various issues.

Presidential politics also could doom the proposal once it reached Washington. Vikram Amar, a law professor who has written extensively about Draper’s plans, pointed out last fall that the shift in California’s votes in the Electoral College — which have been awarded for a quarter-century to Democratic nominees — would be split between three states. And one of those states, based on past election results, could be won by a Republican.

Amar wrote that Democrats would be “very reluctant to run the risk” of supporting the proposal in Congress. “And risk aversion looms large in these matters, which helps explain why no new states have been added to the United States in over 50 years, and no new state has been created out of an existing state for more than 150 years,” he wrote.

There also is a sizable debate about whether such a sweeping change can be created through a ballot initiative — that is, whether it rises to the level of a “revision” of the California Constitution, which can only be instigated by the Legislature or by a formal constitutional convention. Revisions, Amar wrote in 2017, are generally seen by the courts as the most substantial kinds of changes to a government.

“What is of greater importance to a state than its geographic boundaries?” Amar wrote. “As the national debate about a wall along the Mexican border rages, we are reminded that even in a digital age, physical space and physical lines matter immensely to the course of peoples’ lives, and the legal regimes under which they live.”

A nascent opposition campaign already is sounding the more practical alarms about splitting California into three states. It could easily be bankrolled by some of the state’s most powerful forces, especially those that are aligned with Democratic leaders.

"This measure would cost taxpayers billions of dollars to pay for the massive transactional costs of breaking up the state, whether it be universities, parks, or retirement systems,” said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic political strategist representing opponents to the effort. “California government can do a better job addressing the real issues facing the state, but this measure is a massive distraction that will cause political chaos and greater inequality.”

Critics have long wondered how citizens of a state where the majority of water supplies exist in one region would react if negotiations over new interstate compacts to share the resource turned contentious. College students who live in cities like Fresno may balk at being charged out-of-state tuition at UCLA. A San Diego company with an office in San Francisco could find itself facing two corporate tax structures and workplace regulations that a northern state might impose differently than one in the south.

Draper’s fascination with splitting California into separate states has been his only real foray into state politics, though he served briefly on the state Board of Education for one year in 1998. The 60-year old entrepreneur, who is registered as an unaffiliated voter, often is identified as an early adopter of “viral marketing” in the 1990s and was an early investor in technology companies like Skype and Hotmail. Recently, Draper has been an outspoken advocate for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

At an Amsterdam technology conference in April, the investor’s praise of Bitcoin included some of the same messages he’s used in support of splitting California into multiple pieces — namely, that residents will be free to move to whichever version of the state they think is governed best.

“The governments will have to compete for us now,” Draper told the crowd. “Because if we don’t like one, we can now bust out.”

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No way this passes. The leftist media in California is in full propaganda mode against it. They are saying that it will benefit Republicans, and we can't have that.

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The effort faces strong headwinds. A poll conducted in April found that only 17 percent of registered California voters favored the proposal, while 72 percent opposed it.

Even if approved by state voters, splitting up the state still would require approval from Congress — no easy thing in a sharply divided country. Voters approved breaking California into two states in 1859, but Congress never acted on that request.

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2 in 10 , so half of california taxpayers . That is pretty major support . Somebody needs to let the extreme leftists know that once CalExit s complete they can do whatever they like to the populance with no restraints. That should bump it up to 80 percent .

Im betting it won't pass though, people are scared of change and splitting California into 3 is a lot of change. It would probably neutralize California's (current progressive) voice in the senate though, which would be good.

Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty

No way this passes. The leftist media in California is in full propaganda mode against it. They are saying that it will benefit Republicans, and we can't have that.

Good, more unclear targets to send the hollywood money after.

Originally Posted by Schifference

Will they build walls?

If the split happened, yea San Diego will DEF. want the walls since they're the ones that have to deal with it. They already want it now even though Gov Brown is trying to cuck out California into a sanctuary state.

Last edited by eleganz; 06-13-2018 at 10:00 PM.

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Whomever drew up that map.. came up with the "new state lines" needs to take a look at a map.

LA.. one state. SF.. one state.. the rest of the state.. the third state
or

In the map drawn up, Southern California would include San Diego, Orange County and the San Joaquin Valley which are all very conservative.

California would include LA and the Central Coast up to Monterey, which is a mixed bag politically.

Northern California would include the Bay Area, Sacramento and the rest of Northern California and would be extremely liberal.

I am definitely considering voting for it..

On the positive side, instead of 2 leftist Democrat Senators from California, you would have 2 leftist Democrats, 2 relatively conservative Republicans, and then you would have a split - probably leaning Democrat. But at least you would have some conservative Senators coming out of California - 33-50% is better than 0%.

The big issue I see is that California (L.A., central coast) is going to have no water... Southern California gets the Colorado river and the southern Sierras, Northern California gets the majority of the Sierra Nevada mountains. But since they are more neutral, they will probably be able to wheel and deal with the other two.

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The movement to slice up the state of California is reeling from internal clashes over what’s the best way to rearrange the state.
The Cal 3 measure, which seeks to break up America’s most populous state into three smaller states, recently gathered enough support to earn the right to appear on the Nov. 6 state election ballot, giving voters a historic chance to improve their representation on the national level.
But rather than get behind the upcoming vote, the separatist movement has fractured into multiple camps, each offering their own plans and criticizing each other for unfair dividing lines, the Washington Times reported.
Paul Preston, vice president and co-founder of the New California movement that want a two-state solution in California, based on rural-urban lines, says venture capitalist Tim Draper’s partition plan -- the one on which voters will vote in November -- wouldn’t address the issue of voter representation, as it would merely create two deep blue states and one swing state.
“With Draper, he makes sure every area has an urbanized zone that will ultimately be blue. You still have the rural-urban thing going on in his formula,” Preston told the Times. “The rural people will be shafted again.”

Yes California’s Louis Marinelli, meanwhile, opposes both the Draper and Preston initiatives, claiming all of them are just Republican plots to “chip away at the voice California lends to the republic as a solid blue state.”
Marinelli’s plan, dubbed Calexit, seeks to make California a wholly independent country and secede from the U.S. altogether – a step too far for other separatists.

The Cal 3 initiative managed to attract more than 400,000 signatures and paving the way to appear on the ballot in November, but other separatists say they are unlikely to achieve much.

“The three Californias measure is dead on arrival,” said Preston. “It’s not constitutionally sound, and everybody recognizes it. Everybody I’ve been talking to — and I get flooded because we’ve got 50 counties engaged in our program — everybody’s absolutely appalled by it.”
Preston’s New California group, meanwhile, is set to hold a July 21 constitutional convention and expect to make a case to the state legislature so the lawmakers can then proceed to split the state. He argues that the only way to achieve a partition of California is to follow the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, Section 3, which states that no new states can be created “without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”

I really wish Minnesota would split in two. Northern Minnesota is far more conservative than the south. The majority of the state legislature is controlled by Twin Cities Democrats who continue to raise taxes. And when they divvy up the money in grants, the money hardly ever gets sent up north. Northern Minnesota would flourish if it weren't for the south. #218MinnExit

This would very likely mean 6 United States senators that are communist / Democrat socialist from California. I do not support communism i.e the murder of almost every single person that doesn't agree with the worst possible thing in the world.

This would very likely mean 6 United States senators that are communist / Democrat socialist from California. I do not support communism i e the murder of almost every single person that doesn't agree with the worst possible thing in the world. Since I don't agree that tens of millions of people should be murdered for no reason at all, I oppose this. Thankfully, I must know what an earth supports this, except for maybe a dozen people on this form and several thousand people in the real world. Thankfully many billions of people are completely opposed to this retarded idea.

I support splitting it in two, the big cities vs. the countryside, then the leftists in the urban part should be thrown out of the union or allowed to leave.

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